Representative Ronny Jackson, Republican of Texas, was on Donald J. Trump’s plane on Sunday afternoon, the day after the former president survived an assassination attempt, when he quickly reverted to his role of doctor.
Mr. Jackson, who was Mr. Trump’s White House doctor during his presidency and parlayed their friendship into a successful run for Congress, replaced the dressing on the former president’s ear on a flight to Milwaukee for the Republican National Convention.
“The bullet took a little bit off the top of his ear in an area that, just by nature, bleeds like crazy,” Mr. Jackson said in an interview. “The dressing’s bulked up a bit because you need a bit of absorbent. You don’t want to be walking around with bloody gauze on his ear.”
Mr. Trump entered the convention arena in Milwaukee on Monday night wearing a bulky white dressing on his right ear. So far, only Mr. Trump has described his injuries; his team has not provided any formal medical briefing to the public since the shooting.
Mr. Jackson described in the interview the surreal moment when he learned a gunman had tried to assassinate his friend and former patient during Mr. Trump’s outdoor rally in Butler, Pa., on Saturday.
Mr. Jackson was in his bedroom in Amarillo, Texas, on Saturday night, packing his bag for the Republican convention. He was watching the Trump rally on his iPad, but he had stopped the livestream a couple of times, so he lagged behind Mr. Trump’s remarks by a couple of minutes. His wife, Jane, was watching the rally on a television in the living room, and she was speaking to someone on the phone. She suddenly called out to him.
“She said, ‘The president just got shot,’” Mr. Jackson recalled.
“And I said, ‘What? No.’”
“She goes, ‘Are you behind?’ And I was like, ‘Oh, my God.’ And so I fast-forwarded it.”
Mr. Jackson said he could not believe what he was seeing and felt terrible that he was not there “because I’ve prepared my whole career to be there when that happens.”
“I have a really close relationship with him,” he added. “And so, to be in Texas, and he’s there in Pennsylvania and that happens — I feel helpless.”
Mr. Jackson’s phone started ringing, and he began receiving a flood of text messages. Mr. Jackson called his chief of staff and asked him to arrange flights to wherever Mr. Trump would be. A few hours later, Mr. Jackson talked to Mr. Trump.
“He picked the phone up and he goes, ‘I’m not taking a lot of calls, but this is my doctor. I’m taking this one,’” Mr. Jackson recalled.
Mr. Jackson told the former president that he could help in whatever way he needed — medically or with the press. “I would prefer to have you here,” he said that Mr. Trump told him. “And I said, ‘OK, enough said.’”
Mr. Jackson said he told Mr. Trump how proud he was of him. “I said, when they raised him up and he had blood all over his head and he raised his fist up kind of in defiance and was saying ‘Fight,’ I was like, ‘Man.’ I was like — for me, that was just the warrior in him coming out. And I thought it was an incredible power move, and I couldn’t have been prouder of him.”
He jumped on a plane later on Saturday and arrived at Bedminster, Mr. Trump’s private club in New Jersey, around 4:30 a.m. on Sunday morning.
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